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Re:In BSD, hardware support is often more graceful

Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on June 21, 2005 07:07 AM

But how much CPU cache do you have? Chances are its alot less than 3 MB. Since it is the cache on the CPU that the data must be loaded to, the CPU will spend less cycles loading a smaller kernel to the cache than bringing a larger kernel to the cache. Also considering that the kernel is the most use process in the OS, larger kernels will greatly reduce performance because of extra CPU cycles it need to read all the kernel data.

This was if I remmember correctly, one of the main reasons microkernels were created, because monolithic kernels were getting too large.